Today in Black History – March 21 *
1934 – Al Freeman, Jr. is born in San Antonio, Texas. He will become
an actor and will be known for his roles in “One Life to
Live,” “My Sweet Charlie,” “Once Upon A Time When We Were
Colored,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” and “Down in The
Delta.”
1946 – The Los Angeles Rams sign Kenny Washington, the first African
American player to join a National Football League team since
1933.
1949 – The Rens, originally from New York, but now representing
Dayton, Ohio, play their last game against the Denver Nuggets.
Their lifetime record, amassed over 26 years, is 2,318 wins
and 381 losses. Their opponents, the Nuggets, will become
the first NBA team to be owned by African Americans, when
Bertram Lee and Peter Bynoe lead a group of investors that
buys the club in 1989.
1955 – NAACP chairman, author, and civil rights pioneer, Walter White
joins the ancestors in New York City.
1960 – Police in Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, fire on Black South
Africans protesting racial pass laws. A protest strategy
devised by the Pan-African Congress to flood South African
jails with pass violators, the protesters will suffer 72
deaths and over 200 injuries in the two days of violence that
will become known as the “Sharpeville Massacre.” The ANC is
outlawed.
1965 – Thousands of marchers complete the first leg of a five-day
freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, dramatizing
the denial of voting rights for African Americans. Led by
Martin Luther King, Jr., thousands of marchers are protected
by U.S. Army troops and federalized Alabama National
Guardsmen because of violence encountered earlier, including
the fatal beating of a white minister, Reverend James J. Reeb.
1981 – Michael Donald, an African American teen-ager in Mobile,
Alabama, is abducted, tortured and killed in what prosecutors
charge is a Ku Klux Klan plot. A lawsuit brought by the
Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of Donald’s mother,
Beulah Mae Donald, will later result in a landmark $ 7
million judgment that bankrupts The United Klans of America.
1990 – Namibia celebrates independence from South Africa.
1990 – United States Secretary of State James Baker meets Black
nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, in Namibia, on the
occasion of Namibia’s independence.
1991 – Test results released in Los Angeles show that Rodney King,
the motorist whose beating by police was videotaped by a
bystander, had marijuana and alcohol in his system following
his arrest. President Bush denounces King’s beating as
“sickening” and “outrageous.”
2011 – Disco-era singer Loleatta Holloway joins the ancestors at the
age of 64. She’s mainly known for her 1980 hit single “Love
Sensation” which has been resampled over the years by several
high-profile bands.
Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Rene’ A. Perry.
The Eclectic Kitabu Project 